WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE – TAPES C10001-C10002 DENIS HEALEY [1]

Nuclear Doctrine

Interviewer:

IF YOU COULD JUST EXPLAIN
TO US WHAT YOUR POSITION WAS AND HOW YOU STILL MAINTAINED AN INTEREST IN DEFENSE MATTERS UNDER
THE CALLAGHAN --

Healey:

Well as you know, I
was Defense Secretary in Britain for six years since '64 till '70 and worked very closely with
Bob McNamara from the United States and Helmut Schmidt was Defense Secretary then in Germany on
the whole of set of problems to do with NATO nuclear strategy and of course, nuclear
disarmament. And when I went back into government as Chancellor of the Exchequer in '74 for five
years, um, besides being on the normal weekly meetings of the defense and overseas policy
committee of the cabinet, Jim Callaghan, as Prime Minister, put me on a very small committee
dealing with nuclear weapons problems which was not set up until I think 1977, mainly at the
time uh, to consider our view on a comprehensive test ban treaty and our view as to whether the
so-called forward based systems like the American bombers in Europe, and the British and French
strategic um, nuclear forces should be included in SALT III. At that time we expected the SALT
II agreement to be signed and ratified, and negotiations for another strategic arms limitation
treaty to start the following year.

Interviewer:

YOU'VE WRITTEN A LOT
ABOUT MILITARY DOCTRINE. FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE AS A DEFENSE MINISTER, HOW SERIOUSLY DO YOU THINK
POLITICIANS GENERALLY TAKE MILITARY DOCTRINES LIKE THAT...

Healey:

I think most
politicians haven't the slightest idea what any of these words mean. And I'm sorry to say most
countries, even the defense ministers who are the link if you like between this area of policy
and the government, cabinet uh, are in office for too short a time really to bother mastering
it. In many European countries defense ministers tend to be ex-military people who hold their
job as functionaries almost with very little political clout. Uh, in Britain, the conservatives
had nine defense ministers in thirteen years uh, during the um... Macmillan uh, Heath period and
Mrs. Thatcher's had uh, five in eight years. And defense strategy, for somebody who's not
studied it at all in advance, is a very, very difficult thing to get hold of. The words are
different from the words you use in normal life. It's almost as difficult if you like as
learning word processing.

Interviewer:

YOU'VE REFERRED TO A
DECISION TO (?), BEING TAKEN BY A NUCLEAR MAFIA. WHY DID YOU USE THAT PHRASE?

Healey:

Well, because since
politicians don't have the time, energy and sometimes capacity to master this area of policy,
they tend to hand it over to a small group of middle-ranking officials and middle-ranking stop
officers who concentrate on this issue and who form part of an international trade union or
mafia of similar officials in other countries, and really, develop the whole thing entirely on
their own without much reference to governments. And if governments are told about their
decisions they normally rubber stamp them. They, they play a very little active role. Uh, it was
different a little bit in my time because I'd been in the army for six years in the second world
war, and incidentally, the disappearance from politics of people who've actual experience in
fighting is rather important because if you've ever been a soldier...in a real war, you know
that Murphy's Law is supreme. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. You always lose control
of events when the fighting actually starts. But in my time, we had McNamara who played an
important role in the second world war in the American strategic bomber survey. Like Paul Nitze
uh, who had also played a similar role. Uh, we Helmut Schmidt in Germany and myself in Britain
who had been writing and thinking about strategic problems in a small intelligentsia mafia uh...
from mainly, almost entirely Germany, Britain, and above all, the United States. So that in a
sense we came into office at least knowing what the problems were and understanding the
language.

Interviewer:

I'LL JUST ASK YOU
ABOUT THE TERM INTELLIGENTSIA MAFIA. AND THE PERIOD THAT WE'RE REALLY LOOKING AT INVOLVING THE
(?). EVERYBODY NOW SAID THAT IT STARTED WITH SCHMIDT'S SPEECH, THE ISS IN 1977. WHAT DO YOU
THINK WAS REALLY ON HIS MIND WHEN HE MADE THAT SPEECH? WHAT WAS HIS MAJOR NUCLEAR
CONCERN?

Healey:

Let me say two things.
First of all, Helmut Schmidt, for whom I have the greatest admiration -- I think he was the last
great statesman in Europe; we haven't got any at the moment -- uh, he had a disconcerting habit
of thinking aloud about a problem without thinking the problem through. Uh, and the reason he
thought aloud about this problem was that he had been dreadfully let by President Carter over
the neutron bomb. Uh, Carter had... uh, persuaded Schmidt that the neutron bomb should be
deployed in Germany. Schmidt had gone through hell persuading his own cabinet to accept this.
And then Carter suddenly decided not to deploy it at all. So Schmidt disliked and distrusted
Carter, and he didn't like what he saw as the risk that the Americans would fail to protect
Europe in their arms negotiations against a threat from the east, and he was particularly
worried when the Russians started deploying the SS-20, very accurate uh, multi-warheaded missile
in place of the old SS-4s and 5s. And he referred in broad terms to this as a danger, in a
speech in London although I'm told that the particular words in this speech were written into
the text at the last minute in the taxi from the German embassy by the man who was then his
adviser on foreign affairs, later ambassador in London, Mr. Rittles (?). And uh, he didn't know
then what he wanted NATO to do, but Carter was determined that he should say what he wanted. Uh,
in a way it was Carter's revenge on Schmidt for Schmidt's rude remarks about Carter. And the
whole period -- I was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Callaghan government -- uh, neither we
nor the Americans could get Schmidt to say precisely what he wanted Western Europe to do. He
finally made up his mind, as you know later in the summer, and that was the beginning of the
(?). But I think it's important to recognize that this argument between politicians was started
by European politician, Helmut Schmidt who was then chancellor of the Federal Republic of
Germany, was running parallel with an argument inside the mafia which was a very theological
argument. Now, when McNamara and I were defense ministers in the middle '60s we had a long
argument in NATO about how to replace the doctrine of massive strategic nuclear retaliation with
something, which was palatable to the Americans in terms of risk. Uh, McNamara really wanted to
do without nuclear weapons altogether in the defense of Europe. The Germans didn't want to move
from massive retaliation. I tried to develop a compromise between them, which was the doctrine
of flexible response in which NATO would fight with conventional weapons until it was in danger
of being overrun and maximize its conventional capability, and then introduce nuclear weapons in
stages, giving the Russians a chance at each stage to stop or see NATO escalate. Um. And the
NATO officials who went to work on this policy after we developed it was one of the few examples
where politicians played the central role in developing a strategy. They took it very seriously
and they said you've got to have enough rungs on this ladder of escalation, and there'd be
something missing unless there were land based missiles in Western Europe parallel with the land
based missiles which would hit Western Europe from the Soviet Union. And this group, the high
level group as it was called, was essentially the NATO mafia I was talking about. They wanted
these weapons whether or not the Russians had SS-20s as a matter of fact, and that has become
very clear in the argument over the double zero option as it developed. So far as the
politicians are concerned, like uh... uh, Callaghan, Mrs. Thatcher, uh, Schmidt, Chancellor Kohl
and uh, Carter uh, the important thing was the SS-20. It was a new, very accurate missile which
uh, posed a much more serious threat to Western Europe than its predecessors. Uh, but for the --
for the military and the intellectual mafia, it wasn't the point. The point was they felt that
there should be something between uh, shorter range battle, and battlefield nuclear weapons and
the uh, long-range weapons. You see, at that time and since, the NATO supreme allied commander
has had allocated to him a lot of war heads from America's Poseidon and NATO Trident submarines
to deal with any local threat. But the mafia didn't believe that that was enough. And their
decision to go for land based missiles was independent of the SS-20. On the other hand, the
politicians could only sell the uh, deployment of cruise and ...in Western Europe uh, by
reference to the threat from the SS-20 so that when in the end the Russians agreed to get rid of
all medium and short ranged missiles uh, the... defense mafia was left very, very unhappy
indeed. And then NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, General Rogers, made this very clear
that uh, whether or not the Russians had the SS-20s, Western Europe needed land based missiles
and the British government took the same position initially until they realized it was so un...
it was so unpopular in the coming British general election they decided to fall into the other
option.

Problems with Flexible Response

Interviewer:

YOU'VE WRITTEN THAT
FLEXIBLE RESPONSE IS NO LONGER A TENABLE POSITION. WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?

Healey:

Well there are many
reasons. First of all, those of us who devised flexible response didn't realize at that time,
although many of the scientists did, that the first explosions of nuclear weapons on the battle
field would black out communications for hundreds of miles around. And therefore you'd lose
control of the battle. And for this reason alone uh, the gradual escalation from one level of
nuclear weapons to another was nonsense. Uh, secondly, it became clear when we looked at the
various options, the ladders on the... lad... uh, steps on the ladder of escalation in the
nuclear planning group which we set up inside NATO to consider these matters, that nobody was
really keen on any steps. I mean, the first step would have been the explosion of nuclear land
mines, the so-called atomic demolition munitions which would be placed in areas where they'd
cause very little collateral damage. But even the Turks wouldn't agree to placing these ABMs in
unoccupied mountain defiles. And the Germans would never agree to having them exploded on German
territory so that went out of the window. And I don't believe NATO's ever reached agreement on
how they would fight a nuclear war at any level. And I think anyone who's had experience of real
war knows that the idea that when literally millions of people are being killed, uh, you can
control a battle is nonsense. And then I think the decided argument is that... even if you could
control the number of explosions and the place where they took place on a bat... battlefield, we
notion the Chernobyl disaster, that it can cause gravely damaging consequences, hundreds,
perhaps even thousands of miles away. And if, as is all too likely, and we've been told by NATO
commanders that any use of nuclear weapons is likely to escalate into all-out nuclear war, well
the scientists now tell us if you have all-out nuclear war uh, life may become impossible
throughout the northern hemisphere, and everybody would be affected whether they're involved in
the fighting or neutral. And so that whole approach to the problem I think is a busted
flush.

Interviewer:

[QUESTION
INAUDIBLE]

Healey:

Well I lost my faith
in flexible response really towards the end of my period as Defense Secretary, round about 1970
when I found in the meetings we had of the nuclear planning group that we couldn't really reach
agreement on even the first step of the ladder. And this feeling developed steadily over the
years for the other reasons I'd come in to. I think you've got to recognize a central point
about nuclear weapons. They've only been used twice in war. They were used by a nuclear power,
which only had at that time two weapons against a non-nuclear power to accelerate victory.
They've never been used since then. They've never been used for war fighting. And nobody really
can know what would happen. We all, those of us who take is seriously, wrestle with the problem,
its moral dimension, its military dimension, its political dimension. And we often start by
making mistakes. Uh, Henry Kissinger and I who were among the first people on our side of the
Atlantic to worry about this problem in the early '50s, only ten years after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. We believed at that time and wrote to our shame that it was possible to fight a
limited nuclear war in Europe. It would be just like a conventional war but on a bit larger
scale. Now within two years each of us had abandoned this view and one of the worries about
nuclear weapons is that the uncertainties attending theories about their use are bound to remain
unless you fight a nuclear war, but after nuclear war there'll be learn the lesson it
teaches.

Cruise and Pershing Deployment

Interviewer:

IN THE EIGHTIES, THIS
WHOLE DEBATE ABOUT THE (?), PARTICULARLY IN EUROPE, THEY BROKE THE BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS AND THE
POLITICAL ONE ABOUT NUCLEAR DEFENSE AND ABOUT NATO. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT HAPPENED?

Healey:

Well, first of all,
there was the purely military argument uh... Many people thought there was no military case for
deploying these medium ranged missiles on land in Europe. NATO had done very well without land
based missiles for twenty years. Nothing had essentially changed uh, since the uh, Apollo and
Thor missiles were taken out of Western Europe following the Cuban missile crisis. Uh. And even
the Reagan administration's initial view was that it was not uh, militarily necessary to deploy
them. Mr. Perle(?) clear in an unguarded moment, uh, an interview with the Boston Globe way back
I think in 1982 or 1983. The second thing was that the argument used by many people, especially
governments, was that while they may be no good... militarily, but they're very important
because they strengthen the nuclear link between Western Europe and the United States. Now, I
took exactly the opposite view. Uh, I thought and many people in Germany did and some in
America, that the only rationale for putting these missiles in Europe was that the Americans
might be more ready to authorize their use in Europe because they could keep America as a
sanctuary. In other words, it raised the possibility of a limited nuclear war in Europe alone
and...the American deterrent. And I remember making this point at um, an American-German meeting
uh, in New York at the end of '79 when I was free to tour, after we'd lost the election. And a
German friend coming up and saying to me, "Please, never say that in public because it's cutting
the ground from underneath Helmut Schmidt's feet." And so uh, I agreed not to say it again in
public until uh... he'd lost the election and was on the back benches. And as you know, I argued
it very strongly in the debates in Britain in the following year.

[END OF TAPE C10001]

Healey:

Now, a lot of people like
myself uh, oppose the uh, cruise Pershing deployment for military and political reasons. But the
fact that there was a large number of people both sides of the Atlantic within what you might
call a consensus who were very unhappy about the decision of course made it a wonderful issue
uh, to be exploited by the people who were against nuclear weapons under any circumstances. And
the cruise...uh, deployment decision was of course grist of the mill of the uh, anti-nuclear
movement on both sides of the Atlantic. And they naturally exploited their opportunities to the
maximum. But I think it should be said too that the contradictions in which NATO strategy was
becoming involved uh, over the cruise...decision did need a lot of people, including myself, to
think again about the whole nuclear problem. I'd always taken the view that you couldn't
actually use nuclear weapons in war. I wrote an article for Encounter magazine along these lines
call "The Bomb That Wouldn't Go Off" in the early '50s. And uh, many of us who'd been led by
circumstance um... particularly the unpredictability of Soviet policy after the Cuban missile
crisis, the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czech... Czechoslovakia uh, came to rethink our
approach and of course it became much easier to think fresh about it when the Russians were
clearly rethinking their approach and particularly when uh, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader
of the Soviet Union because he has carried out the revolution in Soviet strategic thinking which
I would like to see copied in western strategic thinking.

Arms Control

Interviewer:

...WHAT DO YOU THINK
SHOULD BE THE NEXT STEP AFTER THAT?

Healey:

Well in the nuclear
field the obvious next step uh, should -- uh, will be uh, a fifty percent cut in strategic
nuclear weapons and continental weapons, and I hope that that will concentrate uh, on the
weapons which destabilize the balance between Russia and the United States by uh, presenting
what one side believes to be a first-strike capability. Uh, and that would be the SS-18 missiles
in the Soviet Union, multi warhead very accurate missiles and in the United States the MX and
the Trident D5. And I suspect that they will move into the center of the argument. But oddly
enough I think the most important thing, especially for us in Europe, is to concentrate on
battlefield nuclear weapons and conventional forces. What worries me very much is that by
accident really, uh, American Russians started the breakthrough by talking about intermediate
nuclear forces. But if a war happens it'll happen by accident. And accident is much more likely,
a nuclear accident uh, if uh, NATO has got a very large number of very short range uh,
battlefield weapons right up against the front line....which can only fire you know a few miles.
And the important thing I think is to get them out of the way and I think there's a lot to be
said for uh, having a nuclear free corridor both sides of the dividing line, both Germanys. Uh,
and uh, as you know, there's varying support for that in many countries but so long as Russia is
thought to have a big preponderance, particularly of tanks in Eastern Europe, uh, the West
European governments will be reluctant to see nuclear disarmament in Europe go very far. So in
an odd way I think that the most important single thing now is not so much nuclear disarmament
but to make a success of the talks which the Russians have offered and NATO has accepted in
principle to cut uh, conventional forces in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, well back
into European Russia and to get rid of any area where one side or the other has a superiority by
abolishing the superiority. That would get rid of the Soviet tank superiority and what depressed
me in the early year -- months following the development of the INF talks is the inability of
the NATO governments to get their act together so that uh, there's been no really effective
response to the proposals made by the Warsaw pact in the correspondence to Gorbachev.

Interviewer:

A LOT OF THE NATO
GOVERNMENTS ARE STILL VERY DETERMINED TO HOLD WHAT THEY WOULD CALL A NUCLEAR FIRE BAIT. THEY'RE
DETERMINED TO PREVENT THESE NEGOTIATIONS GOING BELOW THE SIX HUNDRED KILOMETER RANGE. WHAT DO
YOU THINK THAT IS?

Healey:

I -- You've got a
very interesting thing that's developed since the uh... INF talks began. And that is that the
German government, although it's one of the most right wing governments in European terms of
domestic policy, wants to get rid of the battlefield nuclear weapons. It wants to get rid of
this fire bait because the weapons that are left are those that can only kill Germans. They'd be
exploded on the soil of Western Germany or Eastern Germany and from this point of view, West
Germans make no distinction. The uh, East Germany is in the common market. It's regarded
practical purposes of Germany. And uh, the French and the British on the other hand uh, are not
too worried providing the nuclear weapons are there and uh, in their view, they think the
Russians are w... unlikely to risk anything so long as nuclear weapons are likely to go off. So
that in a way this issue is splitting Western Europe between Germany and France and Britain. The
other thing of course is the French and British governments are terrified that if the movement
towards nuclear disarmament in Europe goes then further, then their own strategic forces are
bound uh, to be under pressure. And this terrifies Mrs. Thatcher and it terrifies the French
government.

Interviewer:

COULD YOU TELL US
WHAT WAS YOUR POSITION ABOUT THE ...MISSILES, THAT WHOLE THEORY THAT THEY—

Healey:

Well I was always
against it. I went through, in Cabinet...records of the meetings I attended and uh, uh, I
strongly opposed the idea of creating a Eurostrategic balance because I thought it would
decouple the United States and Western Europe and this view was held by our little
group.

Public Interest in Nuclear Strategy

Interviewer:

UP UNTIL THE START OF
THIS DEBATE, AND I SUPPOSE REALLY WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 1977... THERE'D BEEN A COMPLETE QUIESCENCE
IN GOVERNMENTS OF WHATEVER PART ABOUT NUCLEAR ISSUES. NOBODY HAD EVER REALLY DEBATED OR MADE
PUBLIC STATEMENTS ABOUT THIS... WHY DO YOU THINK THAT WAS?

Healey:

Well I think let
sleeping dogs lay partially. And part is that the governments didn't really know or care very
much what was going on as I explained earlier. They tended to leave the whole thing to um... the
uh, mafia of officials and staff officers and not worry. When I was Defense Secretary on the
other hand um, I used to debate these things in Parliament, used to surprise people very much. I
would talk about you know, NATO strategy and debate. But the interesting thing was that uh, I
think people welcomed the fact that there was an open discussion on it.

Interviewer:

BUT TO GO BACK TO
SOMETHING YOU SAID EARLIER. FOR THE POLITICIANS, THEY NEEDED THE EXISTENCE OF THE SS-20 TO
JUSTIFY WHAT (?). WHY DO YOU THINK THAT MISMATCH OCCURRED? DO YOU THINK IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE
POLITICIANS ACTUALLY TO GET OUT AND ARGUE FOR THE DOCTRINE?

Healey:

Yeah. I, I did it
when I was a poli... I was Defense Secretary for uh, six years and I argued my case in public,
in Parliament, in speeches, at the Royal United Services Institute, at the... in Germany of
course um, in the United States. I think politicians must be prepared to argue these points
because if politicians won't argue the things honestly and not in comic strip fashion the way
that Mrs. Thatcher has tended to argue it, then of course the argument is entirely in the hands
of people who don't take defense as such all that seriously.

Interviewer:

( )?

Healey:

Well I think we kept
the uh... electorate very well informed indeed if I may say so. Uh, I mean I wrote and spoke a
great deal about it um, right from the moment I started taking an interest in the early '50s.
Uh, when I was Defense Secretary from '64 to '70, I talked about it the whole time. As I say, in
Parliament and outside. I think you've got silence under the conservative government that
followed which was a great pity but I went on talking about it myself even then.

Interviewer:

OKAY --

Healey:

I mean, I mean Fred
Mulley for example who is uh... uh, Defense Secretary under...

Interviewer:

( )?

Healey:

Uh, and uh, Fred
Mulley who I think was a very good Defense Secretary and uh, Jim Callaghan, when I was
Chancellor of the Exchequer, he talked and wrote about it a great deal. He wrote a brilliant
book, I think, on uni, nuclear strategy in Western Europe. But I'm afraid the real trouble is
that the media weren't interested. And you see, you're talking in a vacuum if the television
companies take no interest in what you're saying and the newspapers don't report it.

Interviewer:

THERE WAS A SERIOUS
INCREASING CONCERN. IT WAS IN GERMANY AND THIS COUNTRY AND ALSO IN UNITED STATES WHEN, IF YOU
LIKE, THE JUSTIFICATION FOR THE NEUTRON WARHEADS STARTED TO BE MADE. AND YET, THE PLANNING FOR
FIGHTING A NUCLEAR WAR IN EUROPE, OR THE CONCEPTION THAT IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE... ONE WONDERS WHY
SUDDENLY IN 1977 IT BECAME ACTUALLY, AS FAR AS PUBLIC OPINION WAS CONCERNED, IT BECAME A
SIGNIFICANT SHOCK. DO YOU THINK THAT THE WHOLE QUESTION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AS A... IS ACTUALLY
KEPT SECRET FROM THE PUBLIC?—

Healey:

No. I don't think so
at all. I think it's the fault of the people who write articles and leading articles. Everything
is publicly available. One interesting thing I discovered when I started writing about this
myself shortly after the last world war ended was that nearly all the facts were available in
the United States which were regarded in Britain as deadly secrets. I remember once telling the
story -- When I went to the defense ministry in 1964 uh, I was given a list of the things which
was so secret I must forget I'd even heard of them the moment after being told. And one of the
secret things was the actual physical configuration of the Polaris submarine. Well, the
following week I happened to be in New York on business and I went into a toy shop and I bought
a scale replica of the Polaris submarine made by the Mattel toy company. And uh, you know, there
is no excuse whatever for the public to claim ignorance. The facts are there. And they've always
been. I got the Institute of Strategic Studies set up um, in the later '50s before I became
defense secretary and uh, that published monthly uh, digests of articles from the world uh,
defense establishment on all these problems uh, an annual on military strategy and on the
military balance. Uh, it's frankly the inertia, laziness of the media which uh, prevented the
uh, public from being fully aware of what was available and I think the tragedy which arose from
that is that the...tends to be made by people who were not terribly interested in defense
perhaps thought there was no Soviet threat at all uh, and indeed there was no danger of war,
never mind whether it came from the Russians or anybody else, but that nuclear weapons were
uniquely uh, morally horrible. And shifted the argument into what I've always regarded as the
extremely barren and... dangerous fight between unilateral and multilateral disarmament when the
real issue is to get disarmament and sometimes unilateral action will be the best force and
sometimes multilateral negotiations. But it's become like an argument in the um, church in the
Middle Ages between the unilateralists and the multilateralists. I'm glad to say that that's
beginning to go and the evolution of Labour Party's policy in the last year or so I think has
shown this.

Interviewer:

( )?

Healey:

My personal political
life in some ways is being dominated by the nuclear bomb. When as a soldier at the end of the
war in Europe I heard the Americans had dropped bombs on Japan my personal feeling like that of
millions of soldiers ( ), was thank god. That means we're not going to have to go out to Japan
now and fight another war then. And for several years the... total revolution in politics and
strategy which nuclear weapons were going to introduce were little understood. But many people
got very concerned shortly after the war, including myself, mainly for moral reasons because
there was a new dimension of horror -- the death of millions of non-combatants. And there were
groups in America who were worrying about it. There were groups in Britain. Uh, very oddly
assorted collection of chaps, myself uh, the bishop of Chichester, uh, a leading Methodist
called uh... uh, Allen ( ), uh, Jack...who'd been head of Walton Air Force and the ex-head of
Naval Intelligence, Tony ( ). We got together and we held a conference on the problem. Some of
us, including Pat Blackett, a Nobel physicist, wrote a book for Chatham House called "On
Limiting Nuclear War". This was in the early '50s. At the same time Kissinger was working in the
United States. And there were para-governmental institutes like the RAND Corporation whose job
was to think about these things, who were doing a lot of work. And Helmut Schmidt who'd been in
the army. He's just about my age. Right through the war started getting very interested in the
problem. He wrote a book about it in the late '50s. And then we set up an institute in Europe to
organize thinking in the Institute of Strategic Studies and I got the money for it out of the
Rockefeller Foundation the very day that uh, the Sputnik went up. And the Americans at the
meeting of that were so worried they were a pushover to provide the money. And since then
there's been an enormous amount of very intelligent writing about the problem uh, by academics
uh, by military people and by some politicians, Helmut Schmidt in Germany, myself, Kissinger in
the United States. The tragedy is that the... newspapers took comparative little interest in
these problems. Defense correspondents tended to write only about what regiment was due for the
chop, uh, what company would get this or that aircraft contract. And the strategic problems were
largely ignored although all the material was there for it. This is no longer true. I mean, you
have some very good people writing regularly in the press. Uh, but this was a comparatively
recent thing. It developed partly in the '60s and I've tried to encourage it a lot myself by uh,
uh, putting money and resources into the military. Think tanks like the Imperial Defense
College and the Joint Services Staff College uh, raising their level and relying the people
there to write things for the public. And this was worthwhile. The difficulty I think was to get
the people who dominated the media to recognize the importance of the problem.